Vital Configurations
by Pinkie Tuscadaro
Summary: Craig near the end of his hositalization, season 4.


_Oh God no please don't let me be that bad._

Craig looked with wide eyes as they brought in a new patient. The nurses were mostly calm, as they had been with him, but he could see the jagged aura around this guy, the same way it had been around him. He could see how this new person couldn't listen, couldn't stop talking, stop moving. Craig watched with avidity. It was like seeing some bad picture of yourself, drunk, at a party you didn't even remember attending, doing something stupid.

He'd been here in the hospital for a few weeks, and the meds had reached therapeutic levels and he could sleep at night, most nights, and he could catch his thoughts again. By the time Joey had brought him here his thoughts were so fast, just meteor streaks across the flat gray sky of his brain.

The new patient was proving to be trouble. Craig watched, and he got louder, and the nurses and doctors took that subtle formation that they would with manic, potentially violent patients. Patients like him. He hung his head, listening to the rambling, the loose associations coming out of the new guy's mouth.

When Joey had brought him in here he had been like that, unwilling to stay, unwilling to stop talking about Ashley and his father and hitting Joey, and every time someone touched him it almost burned, they had to leave him alone. The doors were locked and he felt the hospital unit was like a cage, and then Joey's bruised and bleeding face would flash into his mind and he'd think he belonged here.

The staff was closing in on the new patient, and Craig stood near the nurses' desk and watched quietly. They circled, like Indians in those old spaghetti westerns, and he could see the needle in one of the nurses' hands. He saw the psychiatrist, a nice Freudian with a beard and watery eyes. He closed his eyes and remembered when he had first come here, and they spoke quietly to Joey, telling him to go. He wanted Joey to go, and he wanted him to stay. He would need to atone for what he had done to Joey. He was just like his father, he, Craig, was as violent and unpredictable as his father had been. Hadn't he feared that all these years? Hadn't he feared that adulthood would bring some shade of his father with it, his tone of voice and his temper? Hadn't his fears come true?

He watched as they wrestled the new guy to the ground with practiced moves so that neither the patient or any of the staff would get hurt, and he watched as they rubbed the square of cotton soaked with alcohol across his upper arm and drove the needle home. It wouldn't take long now, Craig knew. That had happened to him, but he wasn't on the floor, he'd been on a bed, struggling against everyone who was trying to trap him, who couldn't understand, who were trying to hurt him like his father had hurt him. He had felt like all those suppressed memories of those beatings were flooding back. That sense of helplessness, of hatred mixed with some bizarre love, of the feeling of being held down, hit, kicked, it all flooded back to him. He had barely felt the needle that went into his arm by a sweet faced nurse with a grim expression. It hadn't taken long to feel different, to feel slowed down, dream like for an instant before he fell into a drugged sleep.

"Craig?" He looked up at his name, and it was one of the older nurses, her hair gray/white, but her face and eyes almost young looking. Younger than all that gray hair would suggest. He tore his gaze away from the new patient and looked at her. He was trying very hard to be able to pay attention, to silence the running commentary in his head and focus on people.

"Yeah?" he said.

"Why don't you go to your room? It's almost time for your medicine,"

He nodded and turned away, wanting to give this new patient his privacy, what little of it he would have here. Nothing was private anymore. Nothing. He was theirs, inside and out. The psychiatrists rooted around in his head with their crude instruments, the nurses catalogued every scrape and bruise, took his vital signs twice a day. It was weird about the vital signs. It felt like a violation, in a way. Blood pressure, pulse, respirations, temperature. The secret readings of his body, the numbers that meant something to nurses and doctors but not to him. Still, he didn't want them to so easily measure these vital configurations.


End file.
